1036: 4P

LING 1030: The Diversity of Languages

Introduction

Outline

1 Introduction

2 Paleosiberian languages

3 The Sino-Tibetan family General information Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

4 Paleosiberian languages

5 Austroasiatic language family

6 Thai Languages 6

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Dravidian languages

Introduction

A brief statistical refresher

Languages spoken in Asia constitute 30% of the languages of the world

The most populous language families spoken in Asia are: Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan

How many language families are there in the world? ⇒ ~147 the speakers of the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan families constitute

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over half of the world’s population (over 4 billion speakers.)

Introduction

Language families spoken in Asia

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Introduction

Language groups in Asia (incomplete)

Altaic languages (possibly a family)

Paleosiberian languages (no a family)

Sino-Tibetan

Austroasiatic

Thai

Dravidian

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Paleosiberian languages

Outline

1 Introduction

2 Paleosiberian languages

3 The Sino-Tibetan family General information Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

4 Paleosiberian languages

5 Austroasiatic language family

6 Thai Languages 6

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Dravidian languages

Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages

It is a geographical grouping of language families and isolates spoken in Siberia. The term paleo in the name reflects the notion that these descend from ancient languages that predated other languages of the region belonging to the Turkic and Tungusic families.

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Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages

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Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages: grammatical properties

agglutinative

most exhibit SOV word order

they are quite different from one another

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These languages have characteristics that recall a number of Native American languages . For example, they are polysynthetic.

Inflection

Polysynthetic morphology

A subcase of languages with agglutinative morphology in which not only grammatical morphemes, but also root morphemes may accumulate so that a single word can represent a whole sentence. This process is called root incorporation.

Example from Cuckchi:

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Təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən. t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən 1.SG.SUBJ-great-head-hurt-PRES.1 'I have a fierce headache.’

⇒ The entire sentence is expressed in one word.

Paleosiberian languages

Ket – an isolate?

the westernmost representative of this group it is the last survivor of a Yeniseian language family for the past 90 years linguists have been proposing that it is related to the Na-Dene languages (e.g. Athabascan and related languages), a language family spoken in the western parts of Canada and the United States.

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The Sino-Tibetan family General information

Outline

1 Introduction

2 Paleosiberian languages

3 The Sino-Tibetan family General information Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

4 Paleosiberian languages

5 Austroasiatic language family

6 Thai Languages 6

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Dravidian languages

The Sino-Tibetan family General information

The Sino-Tibetan family

Two main branches of the Sino-Tibetan family

Sino-Tibetan

e.g. Burmese, Tibetan

Sinitic Tibeto-Burman e.g. Chinese

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The Sino-Tibetan family General information

The Sino-Tibetan family

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The Sino-Tibetan family General information

Sino-Tibetan: basic grammatical properties

- basic word order SOV - often tonal (e.g. Yi: 3 tones) - sometimes ergative (e.g. Tibetan) -morphology varies from complex/agglutinative (Ao) in the Himalayas to simple/analytic (Yi) in Yunnan

(1) Yi (written in Yi script):

(Yi: Tibeto-Burman; Yúnnán)

Not all Sino-Tibetan languages are tonal

Burmese, Jingpho → tonal (likely a recent development) Classical Tibetan and many Tibetan dialect → non-tonal

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Tibeto-Burman

Tibeto-Burman ________________________________|_____________________________________________ | | | | | |

Bodic Burmic Qiangic Kuki-Chin Rung Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw (Tibetan, (Lahu, Kachin, (Qiang, Pumi etc) (Mizo, Ao etc) (Gyalrong, (Bodo-Garo, Jinghpaw...) Newari etc) Burmese, Yi etc) Rawang etc)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Siyr8zxoVOA - languages of Tibetan plaeau

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leBTVyqOnF4 - Tibet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQFWC3zLjsY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsQdaHQekZs - Tibetan monks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuMndeOVdo8 - Dalai Lama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWDiIlMmJ2Q - Milarepa

Basic vocabulary in Tibeto-Burman and Chinese dialects

Burmese Tibetan Old Chinese Cantonese Chiu Chow I nga nga *nga/ngay ngo ua eye myak mig *mjuk muk mak fish ngà nya *ngjwo jyu hu die se shi-ba *sjid-x>si: sei si two hnac gnyis *njid ji tsi three sùm gsum *sem saam sa$ six drug *lj?kw > ljuk luk lak eight brgyad *priat > pwat baat poih

Reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan

Proto-Sino-Tibetan: monosyllabic with complex syllable structure; derivational verb morphology; tonal?

** marks reconstructed Proto-Sino-Tibetan forms *OC: Old Chinese (pronunciations as reconstructed by Baxter)

blood: ** shwi? > Burmese swè, Kachin sai, OC *hwit > xiwet blood (Can. hyut3) center/middle: ** k?y?ngw > Tibetan gzhung, OC *trj?ngw > tjung centre (Chaozhou tong, Can zung1) cold ** gljang > Tibetan grang-ba cold , OC *gljang > ljang cool (Can. loeng4) drip ** tik > Tib. thig-pa to fall in drops , OC *tik (Can. dik1) dry ** kan > Burmese khan, dry up , OC * kan (Can. gon1) cheat ** rngwar > Tib. rngod-pa deceive , OC *ngwar (Can. ngaak1) beautiful ** mjiod > Kachin moi beautiful , OC *mjidx > mji: (Can. mei5) think ** ni?m > Tib. nyam soul, mind, thought , OC *niem

The Sino-Tibetan family General information

Sinitic languages

often referred to as "varieties of Chinese"

they started diverging rather recently

Almost all descend from Middle Chinese

the written language has always been rather uniform throughout the country

now mutually unintelligible → different languages

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TONAL PHONOLOGY

There are many languages which utilize contrasts in relative pitch at which a syllable is pronounced to distinguish between wordforms. The relative pitch of the voice in such languages is subject to systematic restrictions just like any other phonetic property.

The relative pitch of the voice = Tone

TONAL PHONOLOGY IN ORIENTAL LANGUAGES

Cantonese Chinese: (in the traditional transcription of Chinese tones proposed by the Chinese linguist Chao in 1928, 5 represents high pitch and 1 low pitch)

(13) 55 si poem 22 si affair 33 si try 21 si time (phonologically 11) 53 si silk 24 si city 35 si cause

Tone and register:

Two different registers:

(14) Yin register 55 22 53 35

Yang register 33 21 (=11) 24

level level falling rising

Tones

The Sino-Tibetan family General information

Sinitic languages

The written language is understood throughout China, regardless of the speaker’s dialect However, oral communication between speakers of different dialects is very difficult. the writing system is a logographic script: literacy in the standard written language does not give very reliable cues toward standard pronunciation. In other words, a Chinese character that has the same meaning in all the dialects may have a very different sound value from dialect to dialect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvGPeezXDIg

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese: phonology

Mandarin is a tonal language with 4 tonal contrasts (that’s less than many non-Mandarin dialects)

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese: morphology and syntax

Parts of speech are not distinguishable by morphology no inflectional morphology

the same morpheme often functions as a different part of speech in different contexts without derivational morphology E.g. the word [xja] can be a verb or a postposition

(2) Mandarin Chinese

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese: pronouns

No gender distinctions in pronouns (unlike in European languages)

They do regularly distinguish between singular and plural number

Some varieties distinguish 1pl inclusive and 1pl exclusive

(3) Beijing Mandarin

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese: nouns

Nouns do not show a number distinction For example, the word [ôen] can mean either ‘person’ or ‘persons’, depending on the context. Number can be disambiguated by modifiers such as ‘many’. No gender but there is a noun class system Nouns are sometimes preceded by the so called classifier Classifiers are similar to such English terms as three head of cattle. several dozen classifiers in Mandarin

chosen based on such factors as the appearance of the object being counted

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Examples of classifiers in Mandarin

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese: noun compounding

Noun compounding is a very productive process in Mandarin Chinese.

The large majority of nouns in modern Chinese are compounds, typically formed from two elements, each of which were independent words in Old Chinese.

Compounding is much exploited in the formation of new words (especially of new technical vocabulary)

That makes their meaning very transparent morphologically

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(4) fəi-ki fly-engine ‘airplane’

(5) piən-ja-khi change-pressure-implement ‘transformer’

(6) fa-tiən-ki emit-electricity-engine ‘electric generator’

The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Three types of "being"

English (and many other languages) use the verb be in many different contexts

(7) I am a student. = The COPULA be

(8) I am at home. = The LOCATIVE be

(9) There are only 8 planets in the SS. = The EXISTENTIAL be

But in Mandarin (and some other languages, too) the three types of be are expressed by different words.

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Three types of be in Mandarin

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese: Verb compounds

Even though noun compounds seem to be more common crosslinguistically, verbs can be compounded too – for instance, in Mandarin Chinese:

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese: Word order and grammatical relations

The basic word order in Mandarin is SVO (this means that the head-parameter for Chinese is set to: left-headed) There is no case marking Subjects and objects are differentiated by word order, which is fixed (in this respect, Mandarin and English are alike)

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The Sino-Tibetan family Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

Language groups in Asia (incomplete)

Altaic languages (possibly a family)

Paleosiberian languages (no a family)

Sino-Tibetan

Austroasiatic

Thai

Dravidian

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Austroasiatic language family

Outline

1 Introduction

2 Paleosiberian languages

3 The Sino-Tibetan family General information Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

4 Paleosiberian languages

5 Austroasiatic language family

6 Thai Languages 6

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Dravidian languages

Austroasiatic language family

Austroasiatic languages

austro means ‘south(ern)’ (<Greek)

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Austroasiatic language family

Austroasiatic languages

Two main branches: the western on, Munda, and the eastern one, Mon-Khmer

Austroasiatic

Mon-Khmer e.g. Khmer (Cambodia), Vietnamese (Vietnam)

Munda e.g. Ho, Sora

(India)

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Austroasiatic language family

Austroasiatic languages: grammatical properties

Although they are two branches of the same family, they are geographically distant, and they developed in very different ways.

Munda 21 languages influenced by Indo-European and Dravidian lgs agglutinative morphologically complex noun-incorporation (e.g. Sora) SOV, postpositions

Mon-Khmer 147 languages

influenced by Sinitic lgs

not very complex (analytic)

SVO

Some developed tone (Vietnamese)

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Austro-Asiatic Languages

Hmong-Khmer: Vietic Miao, Yao, Bunu...; She

-complex classifier systems -tone sandhi

Tai languages

Thai, Lao (standard languages of Thailand and Laos)

Dai (Yunnan province, PRC; mutually intelligible with Thai)

Zhuang ("minority" language with 6 million speakers, mostly in Guangxi, Guizhou provinces)

Li (Hainan island)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xJ8aHZUHr0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnLkNKyzgjk - Naresuan

Typology of Thai languages:

tonal: typically 5-6 tones; up to 15 in Kam (Dong).

Thai: Analytic morphology: independent words expressing grammatical categories

Progressive aspect: (1) Khaw kamlang rian phasaa thaai yuu

S/he PROG study language Thai at She s studying the Thai language.

Nominalization: (2) Kaan rian phasaa thaai sanuk maak

NOM study language Thai fun much Studying Thai is fun

Plural: (3) phuak khaw

PL s/he "they"

Noun before modifier order:

(4) baan suay pretty house (Thai) house pretty

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xJ8aHZUHr0

Long-distance genetic relationships: The Austric hypothesis

- provides an alternative affiliation for Tai and Hmong-Mien languages - also includes Austro-Asiatic ("south Asian") and Austronesian ("southern island") families

Austric _________________|_____________________________ | | |

| Austro-Asiatic Austronesian Tai Hmong-Mien (Vietnamese, (Malay, Formosan (Thai, (Miao, Yao) Khmer etc) & Polynesian Zhuang etc)

languages)

Evidence from bisyllabic Austronesian roots: Vietnamese (Austroasiatic) preserves first syllable, Thai preserves second syllable

Malay Vietnamese Thai "eye" mata mat taa "bird" manuk nook "hand" lima meu

Dravidian languages

Outline

1 Introduction

2 Paleosiberian languages

3 The Sino-Tibetan family General information Sketch of Mandarin Chinese

4 Paleosiberian languages

5 Austroasiatic language family 6

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Dravidian languages

Dravidian languages

Dravidian languages

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Dravidian languages

Dravidian languages

spoken in south India and parts of Sri Lanka

over 200 million speakers

that’s more speakers than any other family in Asia except Sino-Tibetan

Dravidian languages originally extended much farther north before being pushed to the south by the invading Indo-Iranian tribes (Indo-Europeans) in prehistoric times.

The four major Dravidian languages: Telugu (75 million speakers) Tamil (70 million speakers) Kannada (40 million speakers) Malayalam (35 million speakers)

Basic grammatical properties Word order: SOV Agglutinative (but not as complex as e.g. Turkish)

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